I do think having better content on Steemit will make the platform more popular, but only if the current algorithms change. At present a lot of the good content isn’t even seen or rewarded because it is written by minnows. The only way for their content to be seen is through good luck or more likely by cheating (buying votes).
With the current way Steemit is setup there is also no incentive for the bigger fish to write quality content because they could write anything or just post a meme and get a big payout. I’m not saying all big fish do that because a lot of them do write quality posts, but there is also a lot of garbage earning hundreds of dollars.
If Steemit had some sort of quality control which actually rewarded people for producing quality posts irrespective of who wrote them and stopped paying out for posts made up of a one line comment or a not very funny meme copied from a website then it would produce much higher quality posts and more people would use it